File spoon-archives/phillitcrit.archive/phillitcrit_2000/phillitcrit.0007, message 212


Date: Sat, 22 Jul 2000 17:12:20 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Ben B. Day" <bday-AT-cs.umb.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: National Socialism and Truth


On Sat, 22 Jul 2000, Howard Hastings wrote:

> One is a "materialist" when one takes matter for the primary
> reality.  That is still a very broad designation, which may include very
> different philosophical tendencies and degrees of critical 
> sophistication.   Materialists tend to see ideas as impermanent, changing,
> dependent upon material conditions and so changing as these change.  They
> tend to allow negation a constructive rather than simply destructive role
> in thinking.

Well, this is not what is meant by Marx's "materialism." Marx's
"materialism" is simply the primacy of economic relations, and these
relations are no more material (in the sense of physical matter) than
religious, state, or other cultural relations. The term comes from a
popular misreading of Hegel that prevailed at the time (and which Marx was
caught up in), which read him as what today we might call a "voluntarist."
In other words, he was read as arguing that people propel history forward
through their ideas and intentions. Today we know that Hegel's usage of
terms like "Idea," "notion," "Geist [Mind or Spirit]," etc., led rather
indepenent lives from the social actors caught up in them. The Weltgeist
was the aggregation of cultureal and social relations, practices, etc.,
which possessed a logic and immanent contradictions of its own which drove
history. But Marx, not understanding this, constructed the
idealist-materialist dichotomy along lines which today are closer to the
debate over humanism (for and against). Although Marx did - like most 19th
century thinkers - model his methodology for uncovering social forces
after the natural sciences, I'm not aware that he ever held the position
that physical forces drove the economy. Indeed, economic relations were
the object of analysis, and there was no Lockean move which would indicate
that economic forces were driven by physical phenomena, but we'd simply
have to "settle" for economic analyses until the physical sciences had
advanced enough.

> ... perhaps even beginning with
> Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity.  From that work it is easier to
> move back to Hegel or forward to Marx, and read them coherently, as in
> without pulling out a statement here and there to refute.

It's never easier to move back to Hegel. ;)

----Ben




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